Ethelwyn Manning

Ethelwyn Manning

• Ethelwyn Manning's Wikipedia Page
• Letter to Ethelwyn Manning from John Birch
• Ethelwyn Manning Papers, 1885 - 1972

Born: 23 November 1885 Newtown Center, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States
Died: 1 June 1972 (aged 86)
Nationality: American
Education: Smith College and Simmons College
Known For: Librarian, Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Programs

Manning was the second Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library. During World War II, she assisted the Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) on Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, later known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA).

Education

Manning graduated from Smith College in 1908 and the school of Library Science at Simmons College in 1911. She also studied at the Training School for Children's Librarians at the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh.

Career

Manning began her career as a Children's Librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library in 1909. She subsequently held positions in the public libraries of Burlington, Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Milton, Massachusetts. In 1917, she was appointed Head Cataloger of the Amherst College Library in Massachusetts.

In September 1924, Manning was appointed the second Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library, a research institute dedicated to promoting the study of art history and related subjects that had been founded four years earlier by Helen Clay Frick as a memorial to her father, the collector Henry Clay Frick. Manning worked at the Frick Art Reference Library for twenty-four years, overseeing the institution's transfer from its original location in a two and one-half story building at 6 East 71st Street to its present thirteen story building located at 10 East 71st Street. During World War II, when the Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) on Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas was in residence at the Library, she worked alongside art historians on the Committee to prepare maps detailing the location of art treasures and landmarks in war zones and in danger of Nazi plundering. Manning was also instrumental in developing the institution's collection of study photographs of works of art, acquiring thousands of reproductions from European photographers and hiring photographers in the United States to travel through the country and photograph inaccessible paintings in private collections. The resulting collection, which presently comprises more than one million images, documents the Western artistic tradition.

Biography of Catherine M. Schwartz

Catharine Meredith Schwartz was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Meredith Schwartz and Caroline Richards Schwartz (nee Dey) in 1883. She was trained through the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Children's Librarian Training School, and worked with her sister, Anna Schwartz at the library from around 1908 to 1917. She worked at the Lawrenceville and South Side branches, volunteered with the Carnegie's Home Library Program, and served on the faculty of the Children's Librarian Training School. In 1917, she was hired as a children's librarian at the New York Public Library, where she contributed to Anne Carroll Moore's "The Three Owls" (vol. 2) children's literature review. In 1924, her life partner, Ethelwyn Manning was hired by Helen Clay Frick to head up the Frick Art Library, a position she held until 1947. Catharine and Ethelwyn lived in mid-town Manhattan, summering on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick with other librarians and writers, including Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. They are both featured in an oral history of Grand Manan called "Cottage Girls and Whale Cove Cottages." By 1950, they were retired (Ethelwyn only semi-retired) and living in Yorktown, Westchester County, New York. They later moved to an apartment in Springvale Apartments in Croton-on-Hudson. Catharine was an avid watercolorist. In fact, the 1910 census lists her as an "artist" rather than a librarian, though she was clearly working at the Carnegie by that time. Find a Grave Memorial 156787233

BOOK REVIEW

Review of Robert J. Spiller, The Cottage Girls and Whale Cove Cottages: An Oral History . Edited by Jocelyne L. Thompson, New Ed.
Fredericton: University of New Brunswick Libraries, 2020.
Heidi Macdonald
University of New Brunswick (Saint John)
1. In the early 19th century, Whale Cove Cottages on Grand Manan Island began hosting a special cohort of summer cottagers: adventuresome literary American feminists, the most famous of whom was Pulitzer-prizewinning Willa Cather (1873–1947). This charming and unique history of these American ‘cottage girls’ is primarily a literal transcription of interviews conducted by Robert Spiller in 1986, updated and edited by University of New Brunswick librarian Jocelyne Thompson, and republished in UNB Libraries’ New Brunswickana Project (https://lib.unb.ca/newbrunswickana). There are twenty historical photos in this book, eighteen of which are new to this edition.

2. The summer cottage community grew from the first cottage, purchased along with twenty acres of land by Sarah Jacobus, Sarah Adams, and Marie Felix in 1902, to several cottages and an inn that served meals, and, more importantly, hosted a daily cocktail hour. Spiller’s interview participants were either local Grand Mananers who cooked and served the cottagers’ meals, did their laundry, and provided them with other supports, including caretaker Red Flagg, and cooks and maids Kathleen Tatton and Kathleen Buckley, or cottagers themselves, such as Helen Southwick (niece of Willa Cather, who inherited Cather Cottage) and Barbara Coney Silbur (niece of cottage owner Alice Coney, who inherited a share of the original cottage). The Grand Mananers’ observations are a mixture of speculation and facts about the American women’s impressions of Grand Manan and their impact on local culture. For example, Helen Southwick noted of her aunt Willa Cather, “she didn’t come to socialize; she came here to work. She was very fond of the quiet” (46). While Cather liked the quiet, she apparently didn’t like the food, and when one cook left the inn, Cather encouraged Kathleen Buckley to take on the job. Most of the observations on both sides were highly positive and respectful, usually focusing on the cottagers’ exoticism, including their smoking habits and car ownership.

3. As local resident Kathleen Buckley explained, “The Cottage Girls had a very good time here. They … used to go hiking all over the place…. And they went on canoe trips with the Indians who would come over from Pleasant Point. They tried to get a library going and were active in getting the town halls started…. They were Democrats and thought the labor movement would amount to many things…. They had their ideas and their standards, and they lived up to them” (56). Such passages suggest that the early cottagers had a reformist spirit common among middle-class women of the age, and I can’t help but assume that the earlier generation were suffragists, though that topic did not come up in the interviews. Neither were class differences raised explicitly; while the locals’ observations implied respect and even awe, they did not comment on the cottagers’ privilege, or the class differences with the locals who served them.

4. On some level this oral history is a border study because Grand Manan is equidistant to the east coasts of Maine and New Brunswick. Yet where many border studies emphasize the commonalities between Americans and Canadians and the porous nature of the border, this book highlights their differences. This may be more because the cottage girls were urban and middle class while the locals were rural and working class. It is somewhat disappointing that this updated version did not address these issues of class and gender, especially given how much historical scholarship has been published since the first edition appeared in 1986. Nevertheless, the book is an engaging account of mutual respect between the cottage girls and locals, with much credit to the cottage girls for bringing an intellectual and feminist culture to a largely isolated Grand Manan.

To comment on this review, please write to editorjnbs@stu.ca. Si vous souhaitez réagir à cet compte rendu, veuillez soit nous écrire à editorjnbs@stu.ca.
Heidi MacDonald is Dean of Arts and Professor of History and Politics at UNB, Saint John. She is the author of the forthcoming We Shall Persist: Suffrage and Human Rights in Atlantic Canada (UBC Press).

• Reference: Famous People Throughout History - SmartCopy: Jul 18 2020, 18:08:32 UTC
• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Nov 17 2022, 12:01:11 UTC schwartz
• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Oct 31 2018, 19:20:59 UTC DeWalt
• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 18 2020, 18:45:49 UTC Kutz
• Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Oct 31 2018, 19:36:47 UTC
• Reference: https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/2442/m-t0627-02648-00247/13251... 1940 U.S. Census

1940 U.S. Census: Ethelwyn and Catherine are living in the same house and both are listed as partners. In the 1930 U.S. Census (See Ancestry.com profile} they are listed as Catherine "Head" and Ethelwyn as "Roomer."